Published Release Notes

Improvements to email case triaging

Improvements to Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Email make the system more robust and user friendly. When you reply to emails in a triage case, you can forward the email, reply to all, and use the carbon copy (cc) and blind carbon copy (bcc) fields. You can also send Pulse messages to discuss an email case without exposing the information to external users. You are notified in the Email Manager and Case Manager portal if you receive Pulse messages. Even when an email case has been resolved and appears as read-only, you can still send Pulse messages.

For more information, see Email Manager portal and Email triage.

All search data is encrypted

All search data in Pega Cloud deployments is now encrypted, both at rest and in transit. The encryption of search data makes search compliant with regulatory requirements.

For more information about search, see Full-text search.

Authentication service for basic credentials

A new type of authentication service is available for authenticating operators by using basic credentials (user ID and password). The default Pega Platform™ login is now an instance of this type of authentication service. All basic credentials authentication services include mobile authentication with the OAuth 2.0 protocol and Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE). You no longer have to create a custom authentication service to support mobile applications.

For more information, see Configuring a basic authentication service.

Unauthenticated sessions transition seamlessly to authenticated

A new authentication service type allows a guest user to use an application without logging in, and to be prompted to authenticate later in the session. This enhancement supports scenarios such as online shopping portals where a user can browse for items and load a shopping cart as a guest but be prompted for credentials at checkout.

For more information, see Configuring an anonymous authentication service.

Create single sign-on authentication services from App Studio

You can create and enable single sign-on (SSO) authentication services from a new landing page in App Studio. From this new landing page you can also configure new SAML and OpenID Connect authentication services to provision users. For more information, see Creating a SAML SSO authentication service and Creating an OIDC SSO authentication service.

Improvements to the Email channel configuration and content analysis

To make the Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Email more useful and easier to manage, you can track all the Email channel configuration changes that you or other operators make. The system now also detects defined entities and topics, not only in the contents of the email messages and its attached files, but also in the email subject field which improves the responsiveness of IVA to emails. You can map same text that appears in an email triage case to different entities. In previous versions of Pega Platform, only the email body was analyzed but with subject analysis, now the entire email is analyzed for topics and entities, including its salutation and signature.

For more information, see Tracking configuration changes in the Email channel and Enabling the analysis of subject field content during email triage.

Protect against insecure deserialization

Deserialization is the process of rebuilding a data stream into a Java object. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has identified insecure deserialization as one of the top 10 security vulnerabilities for web applications. Pega Platform™ protects against this vulnerability by using filters that prevent deserialization of suspect data streams. You can configure these filters from the Deserialization Blacklist landing page.

For more information, see Configuring the deserialization filter.

Support for Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) push notifications in Android custom mobile apps

You can now create Android custom mobile apps that use push notifications with the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) services. The push notifications for Android custom mobile apps based on legacy Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) are deprecated, as GCM services will be officially removed from use on April 11, 2019. To continue to use push notifications, you must migrate your custom mobile apps to FCM services. Before building your custom mobile app, you must register your Android app for push notifications in the Firebase console, obtain the FCM server key and Google Services JSON file, and use the key and file in the Android certificate set to build the custom mobile app.

For more information, see Migrating Android custom mobile apps that use push notifications to Firebase Cloud Messaging, Push notifications in Android mobile app, and Android certificate set.

Facebook and Web Chatbot configuration in the preview console

When you develop a Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Facebook or Web Chatbot, you can now teach interactive bot conversations by chatting with the bot in the preview console and guiding the artificial intelligence algorithm to the right responses. This ability greatly accelerates conversation development and simplifies configuration, while providing the developer with more transparency in the mechanisms that produce specific responses.

For more information, see Simulating a conversation and building a chatbot runtime and Testing and building a chatbot from the preview console.

PEGA0107 alert enables performance monitoring of offline-enabled apps

You can now monitor the performance of offline-enabled apps by analyzing PEGA0107 alerts from Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™. PEGA0107 alerts are equivalent to PEGA0069 alerts in the context of offline-enabled applications, but PEGA0069 alerts are not generated for offline-enabled applications.

For more information, see PEGA0107 alert: Client page load time for offline-enabled applications and Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud Improvement Plan overview.